I heard a frequent question at last week’s Percona Live conference regarding Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM): How much disk space should I allocate for PMM Server?

First, let’s review the three components of Percona Monitoring and Management that consume non-negligible disk space:

1. Prometheus data source for the time series metrics
2. Query Analytics (QAN) which uses Percona Server XtraDB (Percona’s enhanced version of the InnoDB storage engine)
3. Orchestrator, also backed by Percona Server XtraDB

Of these, you’ll find that Prometheus is generally your largest consumer of disk space. Prometheus hits a steady state of disk utilization once you reach the defined storage.local.retention period. If you deploy Percona Monitoring and Management …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how Prophet can forecast metrics.

Facebook recently released a forecasting tool called Prophet. Prophet can forecast a particular metric in which we have an interest. It works by fitting time-series data to get a prediction of how that metric will look in the future.

For example, it could be used to:

• Predict how much HTTP traffic we will get, and scale accordingly when needed
• See if a particular feature of our application will have success or if its usage will decline
• Get an approximate date when our database server’s resources will be exhausted
• Forecast new customer’s sign up and resize the staff accordingly
• See what next year’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday will look like, and if we have the resources to handle them
…

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. In that session, there was a section on how to determine I/O throughput for a system, because in data warehousing I/O per second (iops) is less important than I/O throughput (how much actual data goes through, not just how many reads/writes).

The section contained an Oracle-specific in-database tool, and a standalone tool that can be used on many operating systems, regardless of whether or not a database exists:

If Oracle is installed, run DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO:

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
DECLARE
lat INTEGER;
iops INTEGER;
mbps INTEGER;
BEGIN
-- DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO(<DISKS>, <MAX_LATENCY>,iops,mbps,lat);
DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (2, 10, iops, mbps, lat); …